After more than twenty years in coaching and mentoring, there’s one thing that’s never changed for us: a belief that business has to be about more than just profit. It’s about people; about leaving the world better than we found it. That’s why today, we’re incredibly proud to share that Coach Mentoring Ltd. is taking a bold new step and becoming a Social Enterprise. Continue reading
According to the CIPD, women over 50 are the fastest growing group in the workplace. With the average age of menopause being 51, more and more employees and employers are having to deal with this transition in the workplace. According to a recent survey of 2,000 women aged 45 to 67, conducted by Koru Kids; nearly 1 million women in the UK are considering leaving the workforce due to lack of support around the menopause.
In the first of our series of blogs for International Women’s Day 2019, here are some ideas to use in briefing male mentors to mentor in a female mentoring programme. Research shows there are pros and cons to using female and male mentors when mentoring your female talent. Some male mentors are just naturally brilliant when mentoring a woman. Others need a little more support to really blossom. Here are some ideas to support them: Continue reading
In the last two decades, many employers have shown enthusiastic commitment to gender diversity. Women have made enormous strides in being able to compete on the same playing field as men at work. This is where initiatives such as mentoring and sponsor programmes have been really successful in helping erode this gender imbalance and create more gender equity. Gender equity means fairness of treatment for women and men, according to their respective needs. All the research strongly confirms this as being an important factor in developing more women leaders. So let us consider:
Formal and informal mentoring relationships exist in many organisations. Within these mentoring relationships the mentor may take many roles: being a role model, a sounding board, helping build networks and career support, sometimes simply being there to listen and challenge. However, linked to mentoring, but with clear differences is the role of a sponsor. Is it actually more beneficial for a woman who is seeking to break through the ‘glass ceiling’ to have a sponsor rather than an organisational mentor? Or perhaps she should be greedy and have both!
Supporting women talent specifically requires a further lens on how you look at your talent mentoring design, so here are some pointers for when you are developing mentoring programmes specifically to allow female talent to break through the glass ceiling.
In our initial experience of designing mentoring to develop senior women, the outcomes included one wedding, five promotions, several large pay increases, cosmetic surgery and a bullied mentor! So with the benefit of a number of women only mentoring programmes under our belts, use this checklist when designing a women’s mentoring programme: Continue reading
